Fifty years ago this month, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram published a groundbreaking article describing
a unique human behavior experiment. The study and its many variations,
while ethically controversial, gave us new insight into human tendencies
to obey authority, surprising the experts and everyone else on just how
susceptible we are to doing the bidding of others. The original
experiment revealed that a majority of participants would dutifully
administer increasingly severe electric shocks to strangers - up to and
including potentially lethal doses - because an authority told them that
pulling the levers was necessary and required (the "shocks," subjects
found out later, were fake). People who obeyed all the way to the end
did so even as they experienced tremendous moral conflict. Despite their
distress, they never questioned the basic premise of the situation that
was fed to them: the institution needed their compliance for the
betterment of the common good.

Milgram was driven by the need to comprehend Nazi horror, and today
his research is rightly recognized as a warning of how easily things can
go wrong if people obey authority uncritically and systematically. Yet
its social contribution is only rarely understood to have here-and-now
implications. We urgently need to update our appreciation of the perils
of obedience to accommodate our contemporary global situation.

The most powerful authorities today make demands that can appear
pretty reasonable on the surface - yet are driving us toward oblivion.
Climate scientists have reached consensus that our behavior, if unchanged, is likely to result in social and environmental devastation, including mass species extinctions and human suffering on an unprecedented scale. Will our society continue to pull levers until we administer catastrophic doses?

The Milgram experiments offer a potentially helpful metaphor for our
current predicament, one that I will expand on below. But first a few
words on obedience and disobedience more generally.

Universal Experience, Social Construction and Personal Choice

Obedience and disobedience are universal social experiences. All
human beings know what it feels like to obey - with varying degrees of
enthusiasm - and we all know what it feels like to disobey. Each of us
has plenty of experience with both, and we are always capable of one or
the other at any given moment. Every individual with the capacity for
independent thinking and action makes multiple daily decisions about
whether to obey or disobey various laws, rules, wishes and suggestions
of others, whether we are aware of these decisions or not.

Modern societies are largely founded on the seductive idea that
valuing obedience over disobedience will bring personal success and
social cohesion. We are taught from an early age that even minor
disobedience will sharply increase the likelihood of scary prospects
like personal failure and social chaos. These emotionally powerful
messages are drilled into us at home and at school, cultivating the
necessary habits for powerful interests to function effectively, from
parents and teachers to state institutions and large multinational
corporations.

Bearing less responsibility will have benefits for the country, even if that means wielding less power

There
are two key questions. The first: Do Americans want a future that is
different from the present or the past? To put it another way, is it
possible for Americans to maintain a self-respectful notion of national
identity within a new, disillusioned history of themselves?

The
second key question: Can Americans remember differently — and therefore
advance differently, without the nationalist and exceptionalist identity
that carried them to 2001?

We have little to go by in terms of an
existing record in American history, and what we have is not
encouraging. The Bush years amounted to a simple denial of historical
facts, a life-wasting, resource-wasting lunge for American power, even
though it had already slipped away.

The Obama presidency, for all
its initial promise of change, has been an even bigger disappointment in
some respects, given the electorate’s initial hopes. It has offered
very little in the way of forward movement.

Barack Obama has clung to the same prerogative rights to conduct military action wherever he sees fit. His administration is guilty of many of the same abuses of law that characterized the Bush years.

Apply a blind and one cannot tell the difference between the security-related legislation Obama has passed and what Bush enacted from the Patriot Act onward.

Does
this reflect a cynical liberal effort to mollify conservative
adversaries on all questions related to defense in order to preserve
power? Or does it signify some frightening, invisible hold the defense
and intelligence establishments have over our political life?

The U.S. openly brags about boom times for its drone wars, while casually abandoning our 800 year-old system of due process.

This article first appeared at Satellite Magazine,
whose author Steven Garbas met with Chomsky in Cambridge, Massachusetts
earlier this year to discuss the development of the drone era under
president Obama.

Noam Chomsky: Just driving in this morning I was
listening to NPR news. The program opened by announcing, very excitedly,
that the drone industry is exploding so fast that colleges are trying
to catch up and opening new programs in the engineering schools and so
on, and teaching drone technology because that’s what students are dying
to study because of the fantastic number of jobs going on.

And it’s true. If you look at the public reports, you can imagine
what the secret reports are. It’s been known for a couple of years, but
we learn more and more that drones, for one thing, are already being
given to police departments for surveillance. And they are being
designed for every possible purpose. I mean, theoretically, maybe
practically, you could have a drone the size of a fly which could be
buzzing around over there [points to window] listening to what we’re
talking about. And I’d suspect that it won’t be too long before that
becomes realistic.

And of course they are being used to assassinate. There’s a global
assassination campaign going on which is pretty interesting when you
look into how it’s done. I presume everyone’s read [a May 29] New York Times story,
which is more or less a leak from the White House, because they are
apparently proud of how the global assassination campaign works.
Basically President Obama and his national security advisor, John
Brennan, now head of the CIA, get together in the morning. And Brennan’s
apparently a former priest. They talk about St. Augustine and his
theory of just war, and then they decide who is going to be killed
today.

And the criteria are quite interesting. For example, if, say, in
Yemen a group of men are spotted by a drone assembling near a truck,
it’s possible that they might be planning to do something that would
harm us, so why don’t we make sure and kill them? And there’s other
things like that.

And questions did come up about what happened to due process, which
is supposedly the foundation of American law—it actually goes back to
Magna Carta, 800 years ago—what about that? And the justice department
responded. Attorney General Holder said that they are receiving due
process because it’s “discussed in the executive branch.” King John in
the 13th century, who was compelled to sign Magna Carta, would have
loved that answer. But that’s where we’re moving. The foundations of
civil law are simply being torn to shreds. This is not the only case,
but it’s the most striking one.

For the first time, the world’s top climate change scientists have endorsed an upper limit on greenhouse gas emissions,
establishing a target level for curbing emissions that if not achieved
could lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climatic
changes.

In a report released Fridayby the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), the UN’s climate panel, scientists also said that the target is
likely to be exceeded in a matter of decades unless steps are taken
soon to reduce emissions. To contain these changes will require
“substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions,” the
scientists said.

The panel hopes that its latest report will help move international
policymakers toward agreement on a new climate treaty, as negotiations
have stalled in recent years. The report also concluded that many of the
observed changes in climate since 1950 were “unprecedented over decades
to millennia” and that over half of the temperature increases were
man-made.

“Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean
have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean
sea level has risen and that concentrations of greenhouse gases have
increased,” said Qin Dahe, co-chair of the IPCC working group that
produced the report.

In reaction to the news, Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “The IPCC warns of an alarming escalation of impacts but also shows that preventing climate chaos is still possible.”

Speaking at a press conference in Washington, DC, Naidoo added that
the panel’s warnings call for immediate action. He also pointed to the
on-going situation regarding Greenpeace activists who are being held in
Russia after they protested oil drilling in the Arctic.

“Unfortunately those who are taking this action are now in prison in
Russia, while those that are most responsible are protected by
governments around the world,” Naidoo said. One of the main obstacles to
addressing climate change is a lack of political will, in particular on
agreements that would create legally binding and internationally
enforceable targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.Window of opportunity

Naidoo talked about the urgency of these issues in this weekend’s interview with Bill Moyers.
As the Arctic melts and sea levels rise, Naidoo said bold steps are
needed on the part of policymakers in the international community to
create an “energy revolution” to ensure carbon emissions drop
dramatically.Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/29-4

The message from the IPCC report is familiar and shattering: it's as bad as we thought it was

Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's
new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to
destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative.

In
other words, it's perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer
review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human
history.

There are no radical departures in this report from the
previous assessment, published in 2007; just more evidence demonstrating
the extent of global temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and
sea ice, the retreat of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of
the oceans and the changes in weather patterns. The message is familiar
and shattering: "It's as bad as we thought it was."

What the
report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of
the benign climate in which humans evolved and have prospered, and the
loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate
change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The
story it tells is of climate breakdown.

This is a catastrophe we
are capable of foreseeing but incapable of imagining. It's a catastrophe
we are singularly ill-equipped to prevent.

The IPCC's reports
attract denial in all its forms: from a quiet turning away – the
response of most people – to shrill disavowal. Despite – or perhaps
because of – their rigours, the IPCC's reports attract a magnificent
collection of conspiracy theories: the panel is trying to tax us back to
the stone age or establish a Nazi/communist dictatorship in which we
are herded into camps and forced to crochet our own bicycles. (And they
call the scientists scaremongers …)

In the Mail, the Telegraph and
the dusty basements of the internet, Friday's report (or a draft leaked
a few weeks ago) has been trawled for any uncertainties that could be
used to discredit. The panel reports that on every continent except
Antarctica, man-made warming is likely to have made a substantial
contribution to the surface temperature. So those who feel threatened by
the evidence ignore the other continents and concentrate on Antarctica,
as proof that climate change caused by fossil fuels can't be happening.

The Arctic sea ice is the most famous visual indicator of climate
change. This year the climate deniers took the lead to explain what’s
going on with the Arctic sea ice. “And now it’s global COOLING! Record
return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year,” by David Rose in the Mail on Sunday, and “Global warming? No, actually we’re cooling, claim scientists” by Hayley Dixon in The Telegraph—both
published on September 8—led the parade. Quoting all these
irresponsible disinformation, on September 10, Greg Gutfeld of Fox News put an end to global warming with these words: “Global warming? Yes, it’s finally dead.”

Soon I’ll get to the science of Arctic sea ice. But first a few words about “climate zombies.”

Last year I participated as a panelist in The Anthropocene: Planet Earth in the Age of Humans
symposium at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. I was on the panel
“Energizing the Anthropocene: Science for Smart Decisions” with eminent
climate scientist Dr. Richard Alley. Richard first gave a long view of
global warming, and then provided a road map of how with a $1 trillion
investment, the US can move away from fossil fuels entirely. He is a
great communicator of climate science, especially when it comes to
debunking the deniers’ bogus claims. I’ll pull some quotes from a talk he gave
earlier this year in June at an American Geophysical Union–Chapman
conference “Communicating Climate Science: A Historic Look to the
Future” at the Snow Mountain Ranch in Granby, Colorado. His remarkable
solo act is a journey through his own life and explains in less than
three minutes—how climate zombies can survive on this earth, and keep
reappearing.

Richard
Alley (June 2013): This particular climate zombie is back in force
again. While warming continued, the “global warming stopped” had a new
birth of noise.

Then he shows a map of global temperature data from 1957 to now, from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

RA: Is it getting warmer? Yes. If you take a long enough interval, it’s up.

He then explains how the climate zombies can keep saying—global warming stopped, it’s cooling.

RA: I was born in 1957. There is the data from 1957 up to a little
later. The regression line through the data, and you can see I was
born—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: I married my dear wife Cindy in 1980. We got married—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: We moved to Penn State in 1988—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: We came here to show our daughters the mountains here [in Colorado] in 1997—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: They named a glacier after me in 2002—at the start of a short but steep cooling trend.

RA: Our daughter became a Penn Stater in 2005—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: So my whole life…[big laugh]

When
you look at the map you see that the temperature steadily went up from
1957 till now, but had many local minima that Richard Alley refers to as
“start of a cooling trend.” He then gives an astute career advice to
aspiring climate zombies.

RA: If there is a year of rapid
warming, shut up! And then you can go right back to claiming global
warming stopped, until the next rapid warming, then shut up, then go
right back to claiming global warming stopped…ad infinitum!

This time the Arctic sea ice reporting by the climate zombies was quickly debunked: “No, the World Isn’t Cooling” by Phil Plait on Slate, “No, Arctic Sea Ice Has not Recovered, Scientists Say” by Andrew Freedman on Climate Central, “With Climate Journalism Like This, Who Needs Fiction?” by Tom Yulsman on Discover Magazine—are just a few examples.

from Anne Staley09/25/13Imagine a few decades from now when we’ve sucked our planet dry of
all its natural resources. You don’t think that will happen? Stick
around for 30 years or so and we’ll find out, but for now I’m pretty
certain that given the rate at which we’re going, we may not even have
to wait that long to see that day.

According to a report published on Phys.org,
we’ll need the resources of two planets to meet our demands by the
early 2030s if we continue to use our natural resources and produce
waste at the current rate. The report, by the way, was published in
2009.

A Valuable Industry

We’re left with very few natural resources, and the sooner we reduce
our dependence on them, the better. One of the most effective ways of
doing this is by recycling scrap metal that is processed into raw
material, also called recycled feedstock, which is used the world over
for industrial manufacturing.

Let’s break it down into numbers with the help of this ISRI fact sheet.
Last year, 135 million metric tons of scrap — metal, paper, plastic,
textiles, glass, rubber and electronic waste — were recycled in the
United States and sold as valuable feedstock for industrial
manufacturing to consumers both within and outside the country.

The value of the scrap metal was a whopping $90 billion and the
recycled feedstock it was converted into was sold to more than 160
countries, generating $28 billion in export sales. (Phew, that’s as fine
an example as any of letting the numbers do the talking.)I’m not sure how many of us know that manufacturing products from
recycled ore requires significantly less energy compared with using
virgin ore. When I say significant, I mean really, really significant.

For example, recycling aluminum saves 92 percent of the energy
required to manufacture products from raw material, while the energy
savings that result from recycling copper and steel are 90 percent and
56 percent, respectively. That’s the kind of significant I’m talking about.

A look at what fracking, mountaintop removal for coal and other extraction methods are doing to communities across the country.

The
view from a Cessna reveals some dirty secrets. Flying at 2,000 feet
above the forests of Appalachia I can see what the steep, tree-fringed
roads fail to show: unnatural flat tops, seams of coal exposed like
black-topped runways, impoundments of foul water perched above homes and
schools. A naked honesty is revealed. This is what we have done, what
we continue to do. We deface the mountains, denature ecosystems.

This
is probably not news to you. Appalachia has long been one of the
centers of American energy extraction, a place whose history is almost
synonymous with coal. Since the 1830s the region has shoveled 35 billion
tons of coal into the furnace of our economy. This is often called
“cheap” energy and, at $100/megawatt-hour, it is – as long as you don’t
look too closely.

But when you get down on the ground (or up in
the air, as the case may be), the costs come into focus. Mountaintop
removal coal mining is just what it sounds like: Entire mountaintops are
obliterated to reach thin seams of coal. The “overburden” – the mining
industry’s term for rocks and soil – is dumped into nearby valleys,
burying streams, covering forests.

In a way, it makes perfect
sense. First we go after the resources that are easiest to extract. And
then, to maintain our wolfish appetite for energy, we have to seek out
the stuff that’s harder to reach. Mountaintop removal coal mining is a
classic example. Another would be the strip mining used to extract
bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. Additional cases include hydraulic
fracturing and horizontal drilling to get at shale gas and shale oil
deposits.

Michael T. Klare, author of the book The Race for What’s Left,
calls these kinds of extraction techniques “extreme energy.” He has
written: “To ensure a continued supply of hydrocarbons – and the
continued prosperity of the giant energy companies – successive
administrations have promoted the exploitation of these extreme energy
options with a striking disregard for the resulting dangers. By their
very nature, such efforts involve an ever-increasing risk of human and
environmental catastrophe – something that has been far too little
acknowledged.”

From Newt's epithets to the gutting of food stamps, Republicans try to unite white people to serve a hideous agenda

The recent vote of House Republicans to cut $40 billion from the food
stamp program reflects a deep-seated and insidious racial resentment
toward Americans of color. This racial resentment rears its ugly head
within the provisions for the bill that demand that non-employed
participants in the program get a job, job training or do community
service activities. Though the bill in its current form will most likely
die in the Senate, the fact that Republicans would even pass it should
concern us.

Conservatives continue to lead under the aegis of a
deliberate and willful ignorance about the long-term existence of a
group known as the working poor, people who work long hours in
low-wage paying menial labor jobs, and therefore cannot make ends meet.
Moreover, there is a refusal to accept that the economic downturn in
2008 created conditions of long-term unemployment, such that people
simply cannot go out and “get a job” just because they will it to be so.

I
often wonder if government officials actually talk to real human beings
about these policies, because if they did, they would find many people
with a deep desire to work, but a struggle to find well-paying jobs.
Some of those people would gladly take jobs that pay far less, but are
frequently told that their education and years of work experience make
them over-qualified.

This is not a race-based problem. The
American middle class itself is shrinking dramatically each year in
relation to a poor economy, an insistence on austerity measures from the
right, and a capitulation to these measures on the left. However, the
complete irrationality and utter severity of the legislation, and the
total lack of empathy and identification that inform contemporary
Republican social advocacy is tied to a narrative about lazy black
people and thieving “illegal” brown people.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan
invented the term “welfare queen,” to characterize the actions of
exactly one person in Chicago who had bilked the welfare system out of a
staggering amount of money.
Buttressed by an underlying white racial
resentment of the liberal pieces of legislation that emerged during the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations – laws that had attempted to change
conditions, but could not change hearts and minds around racial
inequality issues — white conservatives latched on to a narrative about
lazy African-Americans stealing from taxpayers and living lavish lives
financed by the welfare state.

Amidst rumours that global warming has slowed over the past 15 years,
the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
states that each of the last three decades has been warmer than any
preceding decade since 1850.

The warming of the climate is
“unequivocal,” says the IPCC. “The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the
amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the
concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.”

“Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the
Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the Northern
Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last
1,400 years,” the new summary says.

“The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature
data, as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85°C over the
period 1880–2012”, it adds.

With respect to the supposed “pause” in the rise in temperatures, the
IPCC says: “the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012;
0.05°C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño [a cyclical
climate phenomenon that affects weather patterns around the world], is
smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12°C) per
decade.”

But, it argues, “Due to natural variability, trends based on short
records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in
general reflect long-term climate trends.”

And it sums up: “It is virtually certain that globally the troposphere has warmed since the mid-20th century.”

Nobre told IPS that “the report observes what is changing, in greater
detail, and reduces uncertainties by means of updated scientific
knowledge.”

It also confirms that climate change is principally due to human
activity, added Nobre, secretary for R&D policy in Brazil’s Ministry
of Science and Technology.

So, let me get this straight. The government pushes GMOs on the
marketplace through deregulation and promotion of the technology by
various agencies until it is flooded, then sits back and tells the
people who have been contaminated by this onslaught to just sit back and
let the market decide. Sounds like a stacked deck to me.

And to top it all off, the counties in Oregon that are trying to ban
the planting of GMOs in order to hold off the onslaught of contamination
that results from these irresponsible and aggressive actions of the
federal government in its zeal to push GMO technology for its cohorts
Monsanto and company, are now confronted by a state attack in the form
of a Monsanto Protection Act placed in an unrelated tax bill. Note the
“other provisions” in bold at the bottom of the following article: Governor Kitzhaber, Legislative leaders come to
agreement on additional school funding, PERS reform, assistance for
small business and working families

Governor to call a Special Session September 30

(Salem, OR) — Governor Kitzhaber and legislative leaders have
agreed on a framework to boost education funding by $140 million to
restore lost school days and provide tuition relief for Oregon students
this school year. The agreement combines cost savings from additional
PERS reforms and new revenue to fund education, mental health and senior
services, and targeted tax relief for small business owners and working
families. The Governor will call the Legislature into special session
on September 30 to act on the framework in time to allow schools to
invest this year.

“This is the Oregon way,” said Governor Kitzhaber. “I applaud my
legislative colleagues on both sides of the aisle for once again coming
together for the benefit of all Oregonians. This framework offers a
balanced approach that will allow for a sustained reinvestment in Oregon
education and other critical services, like mental health, over the
long term. We’re delivering for Oregon’s children, for Oregon’s economy,
for Oregon’s future.”

An international team of climate scientists says it is 95 to 100
percent confident that human activity—largely from burning fossil
fuels—is the main cause of global warming since the 1950s, according to a
leaked draft
of the upcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. Moreover, the jet stream patterns have been radically disrupted
or changed in ways that are alarming. The report, the first by the
IPCC in six years released in September says that global sea levels
could rise more than 3 feet in the next few decades if no action is taken to curb the worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases before then.

The weather extreme disasters are consistently confirming the
scientific evidence that we are now experiencing man-made pollution writ
large at “biblical proportions” and yet the corporate media anchors and
reporters continue to wrongly call these weather catastrophes “natural
disasters”.Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News is no exception to the mainstream
reporters when he labeled the Colorado floods a “natural disaster”. The
operative and deceptive word here is “natural”. There is nothing
“natural” at all about man-made global warming. Martin Hoerling of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that "this single
event has now made the calendar year (2013) the single wettest year on
record for Boulder."

The network evening news reporters, viewed by millions of people, are
failing to report the scientific facts about man-made global warming
and the current extreme weather disasters, recently the wildfires and
Colorado floods.

To never make that connection between the two, to never even
so much as utter the words “man-made climate change” and extreme
flooding is like reporting on the 2010 Gulf of Mexico’s worst oil
catastrophe in history without ever mentioning British Petroleum’s Horizon-Macondo deepwater massive explosions as the cause of that oil disaster.

We’re talking about a very simple concept: Cause and Effect. The
corporate media has conveniently dropped the identification of the
“cause”, the major leading headline of these disasters: human pollution
is the primary reason why weather patterns are turning into horrific and
terrifying catastrophes at the cost of billions of dollars worth of
damages.

A year-long project to measure the economic costs and benefits of
fighting climate change, and to harmonize that battle with lifting up
the global poor, is getting off the ground.

The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate is undertaking the
study, and will release its results in September 2014 — just in time for
the United Nations’ next big conference on climate change in 2015. It
was commissioned by seven countries — Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia,
South Korea, Norway, Sweden and the UK — and will have a $9 million
budget.

“At a time when governments throughout the world are struggling to
boost growth, increase access to energy, and improve food security, it
is essential that the full costs and benefits of climate policies are
more clearly understood,” said
Lord Nicholas Stern, Vice-Chair of the Commission. “It cannot be a case
of either achieving growth or tackling global warming. It must be
both.”

The place where those two goals meet is a critical leverage point.
One of the great fears is that aggressive efforts to cut carbon
emissions will impede economic expansion and entrench lack of access to
energy, thus dragging down the chances of lifting the living standards
of the global poor. One of the hopes for the study is it will allay
those concerns, and help build an internatonal consensus to tackle
greenhouse gas emissions in 2015.

The fact is, not only are the poor most at risk when national
economies are held back, they are the most at risk when climate change
arrives. The latest research,
for instance, pegs southern and southeastern Asia — home to many of the
world’s poorest — as one of the areas that could most easily be
destabilized by climate shifts. The World Bank warns
that within twenty years, rising drought and heat could render 40
percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s farmland unsuitable for growing maize, a
staple crop in global diets. Much of the continent’s grazing land for
livestock could also be degraded past the point of usefulness. In
Southeast Asia, the 2010 floods that affected 20 million people in
Pakistan could become commonplace, and altered monsoon patterns could
wreck the livelihoods of many of India’s farmers.

By Matt Ferner09/24/2013Nearly one in 10 watersheds in the United States is "stressed," with
demand for water exceeding natural supply -- a trend that appears likely
to become the new normal, according to a recent study."By midcentury, we expect to see less reliable surface water supplies in several regions of the United States," said Kristen Averyt,
associate director for science at the Cooperative Institute for
Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder
and one of the authors of the study.
“This is likely to create growing challenges for agriculture,
electrical suppliers and municipalities, as there may be more demand for
water and less to go around.”

According to the research of Averyt and her colleagues, 193 of the
2,103 watersheds examined are already stressed -- meaning demand for
water is higher than natural supply. The researchers found that most of
the water stress is in the Western United States, where there are fewer
surface water resources, compared with the East.Averyt and her colleagues write:

On the water supply side, surface and ground water resources
have been declining in much of the U.S. Aquifers underlying the Central
Valley in California and the Ogallala, which spans the area between
Nebraska and Texas, are being drawn down more rapidly than they are
being recharged. Approximately 23% of annual freshwater demands rely on
groundwater resources, yet the volume of groundwater remaining is
unclear.
Average surface water supplies are decreasing, and are expected to
continue declining, particularly in the southwestern US.. Also in the
southwest, water availability is defined as much by legal regimes as by
physical processes. Water rights define how much and when water may be
withdrawn from surface water sources irrespective of how much water may
or may not be flowing in a given year. Water quality, including
temperature and sediment concentration, can also constrain availability
for certain users.

The researchers found agriculture requires the most water and
contributes the most to regional water stress overall; the U.S. West is
particularly vulnerable to water stress; and in some areas of the
country, the water needs of electric power plants represent the biggest
demand on water -- so much so that a single power plant "has the
potential to stress surface supplies in a local area." In some densely
populated regions like Southern California, cities are the greatest
stress on the surface water system.

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism –
close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in
publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he
says, is to be an outsider.

He
is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to
challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don't
even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so
much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" –
or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story,
it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic
US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Hersh is writing a book about
national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He
says a recent report put out by an "independent" Pakistani commission
about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up
would not stand up to scrutiny. "The Pakistanis put out a report, don't
get me going on it. Let's put it this way, it was done with considerable
American input. It's a bullshit report," he says hinting of revelations
to come in his book.

The Obama administration lies
systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media,
the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.

"It's
pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this
guy [Obama]," he declares in an interview with the Guardian.

"It
used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic
happened, the president and the minions around the president had control
of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best
they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more.
Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to
re-elect the president.

He isn't even sure if the recent
revelations about the depth and breadth of surveillance by the National
Security Agency will have a lasting effect.

One of the rookie rescuers risked his life clambering across the
ladder-bridge four stories high and grabbing the victim as he dropped
from the window.

A group of unrelated men cooperated to save the life of a fellow human.
That is the best of America. That is what Americans aspire to
be—participants in a human community that works together to benefit all,
to advance everyone. But the American ideal of brotherhood from sea to
shining sea is under attack.

A cult of the selfish relentlessly assails the value of American
community. And now, the cult’s cruel campaign of civic meanness is
achieving tragic victories. Just last week, for example, it succeeded in
getting a bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives that would slash funding for food stamps by $40 billion—taking
milk from the mouths of millions of babes in the richest country in the
world. Also, it secured passage of a bill in the House that would de-fund the Affordable Care Act, thus denying health care—and in some cases life itself—to millions of uninsured Americans.

Denying food to the hungry, chemo to the cancer-stricken? That is not
American. That is what ruthless dictators do. That is the stuff of Kim
Jong-il. That is not how Americans treat each other.
It is, however, exactly what the cult of the selfish is seeking. It
wants an America without community, where everyone is out for himself.
Alone. Self-seeking. Self-dealing. In that world, the CEO who succeeds
did it all by himself—no credit should be given to dedicated workers or
community tax breaks or federal copyright protections. Similarly, in
that world, the worker who is laid off has no one to blame but himself,
not a crash on Wall Street, not the failure of a CEO to properly market
products, not a technological transformation.

Decades ago, these scam artists tried to persuade Great Depression
victims that their joblessness was their own, individual faults, not a
result of the 1929 Black Friday market catastrophe. They’re resurgent
now, trying to blame the 2008 Wall Street debacle on individual mortgage
holders. They contend those working 40 hours a week for minimum wage
deserve an income too paltry to pay for food and shelter. They insist
that Social Security and Medicare be slashed, and if that means workers
who paid into the programs their entire lives must live on cat food in
retirement, well, that’s their individual fault.

What’s frightening is how close they’re getting to what they want—a
country in which the rich get richer and everyone else blames themselves
for falling behind.

What kind of society emerges when it is governed by the market-driven
assumption that the only value that matters is exchange value, when the
common good is denigrated to the status of a mall, and the social order
is composed only of individuals free to pursue their own interests?
What happens to democracy when a government inflicts on the American
public narrow market-driven values, corporate relations of power and
policies that impose gross inequities on society, and condemns young
people to a life of precarity in which the future begins to resemble a
remake of dystopian films such as Mad Max (1979), Brazil (1985), RoboCop (1987), Minority Report (2002), District Nine (2009), Comopolis (2012) and The Purge
(2013). What makes American society distinct in the present historical
moment is a culture and social order that has not only lost its moral
bearings but produces a level of symbolic and real violence whose
visibility and existence set a new standard for cruelty, humiliation and
the mechanizations of a mad war machine, all of which serve the
interests of the political and corporate walking dead - the new avatars
of death and cruelty - that plunder the social order.[i]

Unfortunately, the dark and dire images of America’s dysimagination
machine made visible endlessly in all the mainstream cultural
apparatuses have been exceeded by a society rooted in a savage politics
in which extreme forms of violence have become both spectacle and modus
operandi of how American society governs and entertains itself. Evidence
of the decay of American democracy is not only found in the fact that
the government is now controlled by a handful of powerful right-wing and
corporate interests, it is also increasingly made manifest in the daily
acts of cruelty and violence that shroud that American landscape like a
vast and fast-moving dust storm. Unspeakable violence, extending from
the murder of young people and children at Columbine High School,
Virginia Tech University and Sandy Hook Elementary School, to name a
few, to the recent mass shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, and the
Washington Navy Yard give credence to the notion that violence now
becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in
shaping social relationships. Mass violence has become so routine that
it no longer evokes visceral responses from the public. For instance,
when such violence engulfs major cities such as Chicago, the public
barely blinks. And as the mass shootings increase, they will barely be
covered by mainstream media, who have no critical language by which to
engage such events except as aberrations with no systemic causes.

The line between the spectacle of violence and the reality of
everyday violence has become blurred, making it difficult to respond to
and understand the origins of symbolic and institutional violence in the
economic, political and social formations that now rule American
society. Violence has become so normalized that it no longer has a
history. That is, its political and economic structures have become
invisible, and the painful memories it evokes disappear quickly among
the barrage of spectacles of violence and advertisements addressing us
not as moral beings but as customers seeking new commodities, instant
pleasure and ever-shocking thrills. At the same time, violence in
America is fed by a culture of fear - shaped, in part, by a
preoccupation with surveillance, incarceration and the personal security
industry. And, as a result, American society has made “a sinister turn
towards intense social control,”[ii] and a “political culture of hyper punitiveness.” [iii]

For all the scoffing among "journalists" at Glenn Greenwald, Americans trust the media more after his disclosures

There should be no doubt that the whistle-blowing of former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden and the reporting by Glenn Greenwald at the
Guardian together comprise the single biggest ongoing media story of the
last few months — and it has truly been a media story. Indeed,
unlike the journalism that surrounds a spontaneous event like a natural
disaster, the reporting surrounding the NSA disclosures is, in part,
about the fundamental relationship between the press and the government.
More specifically, as Snowden
himself said, it is about “the journalistic responsibility to challenge
the excesses of government” by publishing material the government wants
to keep secret.

Greenwald in particular turned it into that media
story by not only responsibly publishing that material like the
Washington Post did, but also by doggedly flogging the controversy as an
ongoing commentary about the entire relationship between the
public, the government and the press. And because that intrepid effort
subsequently made the NSA disclosures the highest-profile media story in
a generation, it stands to reason that the story will have a
disproportionate impact on the public’s view of the media itself. That
impact, in fact, could be one of the many significant long-term Snowden Effects.

The
question, then, is: Will that Snowden Effect further erode Americans’
trust in the beleaguered news business, or will the story begin
rebuilding that trust?

If the new findings from Gallup are representative of a larger trend, the answer seems to be the latter.In
its annual survey about Americans’ views of journalism, the polling
firm documented one of the decade’s largest jumps in the number of
people who say they trust the media. Notably, the spike in confidence
was seen across all party affiliations.

The takeaway should be
fairly obvious: Gallup’s results almost certainly show that the Snowden
Effect had a positive impact on the media’s image. To know that’s the
case is to simply remember that a) the NSA disclosures were the most
prominent media story at the time of the survey and b) the
trans-partisan nature of the public opinion bump not-so-coincidentally
tracks the trans-partisan nature of the response to the NSA story itself.

Creative protest in Nebraska highlights 'what's at stake' for residents fighting proposed tar sands pipeline through their town

Sarah LazarePublished on Thursday, September 26, 2013 by Common DreamsNebraska residents are showing that they will not allow the Keystone
XL pipeline to tear through their communities or trample on their
livelihoods.

They've constructed a wind and solar-powered barn,
near York, Nebraska, in the direct path of the proposed pipeline—billing
it as an alternative to dangerous and dirty tar sands oil, and daring
the Obama administration and TransCanada to destroy their community
building.

"This is clearly a challenge to the president to say you can choose
our families and clean energy, or you can choose a dirty pipeline," Jane
Kleeb of Bold Nebraska told Common Dreams. "It is a clear line in the sand."

Kleeb told Common Dreams that a coalition of ranchers and
farmers with the Nebraska Farmer's Union joined with organizations
including Bold Nebraska, 350.org, Sierra Club and Credo, as well as
billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, to construct the creative protest
building.

A dedication ceremony this weekend was timed to coordinate with nation-wide actions
across 49 U.S. states calling for Keystone XL pipeline construction to
halt and for tar sands oil to stay in the ground. Over 100 volunteers
gathered Sunday at the barn that sits on the land of a family of farmers
who will use the space to store their supplies and host community
meetings.

Nebraska residents charge that the proposed pipeline would not only
expand tar sands oil extraction and deepen environmental and climate
crises, but it would also threaten the health and livelihoods of people
throughout Nebraska.

"If someone had an oil spill on their property and that got into thir
well, there would be no way to clean it and it would destroy their
water," Kleeb told Common Dreams. "A lot of ranchers are
organic farmers and provide whole foods and have organic certification. A
tar sands spill would ruin their certification. Furthermore, this
pipeline would make the government use eminent domain laws to force
landowners to give up their land."

It has become a familiar pattern. A natural disaster occurs and we
can't help but wonder how it may have been influenced by climate change.
With more than 97% of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers by climate scientists agreeing that global warming is man-made
and basic physics and climate models predicting that a warmer
atmosphere will lead to heavier rains, it's understandable that the
incredible rains that fell on Colorado would lead us to wonder what role
climate change played in the devastating floods.

Atmospheric
water vapor fed by the remnants of two tropical storms—one in the Gulf
of Mexico and another in the Pacific Ocean—had already reached the
highest level ever measured in Colorado for September, usually one of
our driest months. At the same time, a stationary high-pressure system
to the east and a deep low to the west had trapped all that moisture up
against the Rocky Mountains. Powerful easterly winds forced the moisture
upward, where it quickly condensed in the cooler air, resulting in last
week’s deluge.

In Colorado, these “upslope” storms are typically
small and don’t last long—because the conditions to generate them rarely
align for more than 12 hours. But not this time. Instead, optimal
conditions persisted for nearly a week across a vast area from central
Colorado to the Wyoming border. That’s why some meteorologists have
called “Superflood 2013” a millennial storm: in any given year, they
say, there’s only a one-in-1,000 chance that the atmospheric variables
would come together to produce a tempest of such magnitude.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson